Consultant Editor Jamie Hunter visits Eurofighter and the Luftwaffe for the first of our new features exclusive to Combat Aircraft online.
With all 148 Tranche 1 deliveries complete, Eurofighter is ramping up deliveries of Tranche 2 aircraft as customer air forces build their fleets. Around 19 Tranche 2 aircraft should be delivered to the partner nations by the end of 2008, with 63 aircraft currently in final assembly at four sites. Aloysius Rauen, Eurofighter CEO, told Combat Aircraft that in the fighter aircraft market Eurofighter rates second only to Lockheed Martin’s F-22 Raptor, being a ‘few points behind’ in terms of capability – but, as he was keen to point out, the European jet comes with a far smaller price tag.
Eurofighter currently has an umbrella contract for 620 aircraft from the partner nations that developed and built the aircraft: the totals are Germany 180, UK 232, Italy 121, Spain 87, plus 15 for Austria and 72 for Saudi Arabia, taking the overall total to 707.
(A JG74 Eurofighter outside its hardened shelter at Neuburg.)
Germany’s Luftwaffe received 40 aircraft from Tranche 1, but saw an additional nine aircraft being diverted to the Austrian AF. This has impacted upon the Luftwaffe, and indeed just 10 aircraft are in service today with the first operational fighter wing to use the type, JG 74 at Neuburg. The unit has only received a handful of aircraft since 2006 and is flying solely in the ‘air policing’ role, also known as Quick Reaction Alert (QRA). The Neuburg wing has 16 pilots but is eventually set to swell to 53 pilots and 35 jets with the two resident squadrons. JG 74 is currently dedicated to maintaining two jets on QRA, able to launch a few air-to-air training missions as aircraft availability allows. However, JG 74 commander Oberst Andreas Pfeiffer said that as new Tranche 2 aircraft arrive the wing will grow to fulfil a full air-to-air role.
(Neuburg has a six-dock first line maintenance hangar.)
(A single seat Eurofighter from Tranche 2 for the Luftwaffe on the final assembly line at Manching.)
The UK’s Royal Air Force clearly stands out as being the most pro-active with its Eurofighters, having already operationally-declared its air-to-air and air-to-ground capabilities with the Typhoon. The other three European partner nations only ever intended to operate Eurofighters in the air-to-air role initially, before introducing air-to-ground capabilities far later.
(The next single seater Eurofighter for Austrian ready to be rolled out from the final assembly line at Manching.)
The Luftwaffe plans to initially build up its new wings with 24 jets, before back-filling to bring them up to their full strength of 35 aircraft. Col Joachim Vergin told CA that the training wing, JG 73 ‘Steinhoff’ at Laage, has around 24 jets on strength and it ran its first B-Course for ab initio pilots in June 2008. The Luftwaffe’s overall plan is to operate three fighter wings and three fighter-bomber wings, five of these being equipped with Eurofighters. Joining Eurofighter units JG 73 and 74 in 2009 will be JBG 31 ‘Boelcke’ at Nörvenich as it begins trading its Tornado IDSs for new Eurofighters from Tranche 2, becoming the first Eurofighter fighter-bomber unit. From December 2009, JBG 31 is planned to declare its capability in the air-to-ground role with the GBU-54 laser-guided bomb as a priority weapon. JG 71 ‘Richthofen’ at Wittmund will retire its F-4F ICE Phantoms from 2011 to become the third Eurofighter fighter wing, before the fifth and final Luftwaffe Eurofighter wing stands up at Büchel from 2013 as JBG 33 retires its Tornados. This will leave JBG 32 at Lechfeld with Tornado ECRs as the third fighter-bomber outfit, with the reconnaissance wing AKG 51 at Schleswig-Jagel also retaining Tornados.
(The Royal Saudi AF will start receiving the first of 72 Eurofighters in 2009. Eurofighter)
At Manching, EADS is responsible for manufacturing centre fuselage sections as well as being the final assembly line for German and Austrian Eurofighters. With Tranche 2 aircraft now well under way, the delicate topic of Tranche 3 is very much on the minds of the manufacturers. A decision on the third production ‘Lot’ of Eurofighters has been delayed several times, but is now expected in early 2009. Aloysius Rauen said: ‘Nobody has contacted us so far about reduced numbers (of Tranche 3 aircraft)’. But he did confirm that some nations had ‘sought information’ about varying numbers or splitting the batch up.
Photos: Jamie Hunter